Brigitte Wetter the curator of the Klein collection presents a personal look back in her farewell show. She has selected from the now 1660 exhibits in the collection. Hängung #9 features works from the beginnings through to the latest acquisitions. Behind each work that has made its way into the collection lie personal encounters of the curator with artists and gallery owners, studio and art fair visits and constant communication with Alison and Peter W. Klein.

In short, the look back brings together drawings, paintings and photographs that have been and are favourites of the curator. Reflected in these are both the cross-section and the development of the Klein collection.

Architecture has always been a magnificent and much debated platform to express the spirit of the times, worldviews, everyday life, and aesthetics. It is a daring materialization of private and public visions, of applied art and the avantgarde alike, and it is also, as Slavoj Žižek puts it, “ideology that has turned to stone.” But photography and architecture are also clearly anchored in everyday life. We encounter them daily – often unconsciously – with every move we make. They influence our thoughts, actions, and being, fundamentally and enduringly.

What characterizes this close and yet so complex union between architecture and photography, between architect and photographer? Concrete – Photography and Architecture aims to provide visual answers.

Accompanying the exhibition is a catalogue published by Scheidegger & Spiess.

Exhibition: Was einem Heimat war - Single exhibition at Staedtische Galerie Reutlingen

Exhibition

Andreas Langen wrote in the german newspaper Stuttgarter Zeitung about this work:

Photographs of war are much sought-after because they attract attention – drama, death and horror are reliable eye-catchers. A counter-strategy is pursued in the latest book by Stuttgart-based photographer Peter Granser: “What We Once Called Home” (Verlag Bücher & Hefte, €28). It shows us a town that has been literally pulverized by armies, tanks, artillery and shells: Gruorn on the Swabian Alb. Its inhabitants were forced to abandon their homes when their village was incorporated into the Münsigen military training area in 1937–39.
What Peter Granser found here was therefore mostly a complete void. He makes what is absent into an important part of his visual language in photographs that bear a haunting resemblance to the earliest war photographs of all: Roger Fenton’s deserted landscapes captured during the Crimean War in 1855. Echoes of the American New Topographics movement in the 1960s are also apparent, when for example Granser composes black-and-white views of the barren hills of the Swabian Alb. He juxtaposes these images with sober studio shots of the ammunition used in Münsigen – a plethora of elegant-looking, deadly missiles before pristine white backgrounds. This chilling series is lent an emotional charge by the heart-rending, but futile, letter the Mayor of Gruorn wrote in 1937 lamenting the imminent extinction of his town. Peter Granser conjures from these elements a meditative study of transience and violence – a silent memorial in pictures.